This disclosure relates to an improved hopper for a grill that uses pellets as fuel.
Some grills and smokers use consumable wood pellets or chips for the heating and smoking of food. These wood pellets come in a variety of flavors including oak, hickory, apple, maple, cherry, and mesquite just to name a few. When consumed, these wood pellets quickly emit heat to cook the food and produce a smoke that is absorbed by the food to enrich its flavor.
In a pellet grill, typically the food to be cooked and smoked is placed in a closed chamber for preparation. An adjacent hopper, which is often mounted to the chamber, stores the pellets which are used as fuel to heat and provide a smoke to the food in the chamber. Conventionally, the pellets from the hopper are controllably fed into the chamber by the rotation of an auger in a channel that runs along the underside of the chamber and is in communication with the chamber. As the pellets pass through the channel by the motion of the auger, one or more heating elements (often electric) heat the pellets to cause the pellets to emit smoke and heat energy that cooks and flavors the food being prepared in the chamber. After their consumption, the used pellets or the portion of the pellets that remains may be fed into a bucket or other vessel for safe disposal once they are sufficiently cooled.
During typical use, the pellets are fed into the hopper through an upper opening in the hopper. The pellets then reside in the hopper until they are consumed during a cooking or smoking operation. This often requires that the chef or grill master use all of the pellets of one flavor that are loaded into the hopper before switching to another flavor. Furthermore, it is often difficult to determine how much of the loaded pellets remain in the hopper as the sidewalls of the hopper are often opaque and a view into the hopper from the top does not often indicate how full the hopper is, as the bottom of the hopper cannot be seen.
Hence, a need exists for a way to establish how much of a pellet material is left in a hopper for a pellet grill and to quickly permit a change of one flavor to another different flavor in a pellet grill.